‘Clearly, as Motor intuited, it was one of those cars that are just intrinsically “right” from the start’

Sometimes you just have to be in the right place at the right time. For me the right time was 17 years ago, and the place was the Heritage Motor Centre at Gaydon. The Centre had agreed to let me drive a number of its cars for a series of magazine features, so naturally I gravitated towards the oddballs. And the one I wanted to try most was the mid-engined Rover BS prototype you see here.

Sadly, since it hadn’t been on the road for years, there was no question of taking it onto the neighbouring B4100 and blasting down the long straights towards Banbury. I had to content myself with tours of the Centre’s grounds, venturing up to a heady 45mph when I thought none of the security staff was looking. But, as they say, a drive is a drive, and it was still a huge privilege. The BS had rarely turned a wheel since its sole road test in the pages of Motor, 30 March 1968, but I could sense even at frustratingly low speeds that this car had plenty of promise. Which is exactly what the men from Motor concluded, 43 years ago.

Mention the Rover BS to any Rover enthusiast and they’ll invariably respond that it was the greatest car Rover never made, and possibly curse Sir William Lyons for having this revolutionary sports car killed off as a Jaguar-beater. The former’s arguably true, the latter may be partially so; but the reality is more complex than the subsequent myth.

What’s (almost) certain is that the Rover BS would never have reached production in this form. It was a one-off prototype, put together by a team of engineers with minimal attention to aesthetics. The looks were taken care of by chief engineer Spen King – whose innate sense of proportion resulted in the equally square-rigged Range Rover – so it has a certain character. King used single- rather than compound-curvature panels to simplify construction, and the push-me/pull-you profile helped concentrate body stresses into strong bulkheads front and rear.

Had the BS been given the green light, it might have ended up looking like the orange styling model below. This was a proposal for a BS-derived car dubbed P9, one of two Rovers intended to take the company through the 1970s. It could have had a mid-mounted V8 with well over 200bhp, and possibly gullwing doors instead of the prototype’s targa roof panels – Rover’s styling department built full-size mock-ups. But, as the panel on page 105 explains, it would never happen.

Things had looked rather rosier in the mid-1960s when Spen King and his team started to think about building a modern, mid-engined GT that could share components with the recently launched P6 saloon. What set the project on fire was that Rover had just acquired the rights to a light-alloy 3.5-litre V8, previously used by General Motors but superseded in the USA by new thin-wall iron casting technology. The V8 weighed almost the same as Rover’s 2.0-litre four-cylinder but could easily produce twice the horsepower. It had previously been used by Buick, so the Rover men called their concept the BS, for Buick Sports (or Special).
The BS was a real ‘bitsa’, put together in odd corners of Rover’s Lode Lane plant at Solihull, and the Alvis factory in Coventry. The rear suspension was adapted P6 De Dion tube and Watts linkage, the seats from an E-type and the steering rack from a Vauxhall Viva. Using the thin-backed E-type buckets allowed room for a potential third seat in the nearside rear – but only one, because the V8 engine was mounted lengthways behind the cabin, and offset by 5½ inches to the right.

This unusual layout was so that the powertrain could be kept as low and as short as possible – although the V8’s twin carburettors were visible in a clear Perspex astrodome on the rear deck. The modified Rover 2000 gearbox lay alongside and slightly ahead of the engine, and took drive from it by a short Morse chain; it then sent drive back to the rear differential by an open propshaft. Disc brakes were fitted all round, as on the P6 saloon but mounted outboard at the rear – unlike the P6 – because the diff’ casing was in effect part of the engine sump.

Interestingly, Motor’s technical editor Charles Bulmer, whose analysis of the BS appeared in the same 1968 issue as the road test, claimed that the V8 engine was not a Rover unit – which had not yet been introduced when the BS was built – but an ex-Buick V8, at one time converted to solid tappets and fitted with multiple carburettors. Rover’s engineers converted it back to standard-spec hydraulic tappets and fitted a couple of 2in SU carbs from a 2000TC, but the heart of the BS might still be a Buick block rather than one of Solihull’s.

Thanks to those bigger-than-usual 2in carbs and a special free-flow exhaust of Spen King’s own design, which used asymmetrically paired downpipes to minimise blow-back interference between exhaust ports, this V8 was found to give 185bhp (net) at 5200rpm, a healthy 35bhp more than a standard Rover V8. As the following decades would prove, the V8 could easily produce more; and since the BS had a kerbweight of only 1060kg, it’s easy to imagine what a phenomenal road car it might have become. Neither Rover nor Motor were able to measure the prototype’s maximum speed but it was estimated at 140mph, and there was even talk in the heady days of the late ’60s of entering the BS in events such as the Le Mans 24 Hours, where the Rover-BRM gas turbine had run successfully in ’63.

Rover seems to have done very little testing with the BS before lending it to Motor, early in 1968. They’d done enough, however, to have realised that as originally built, with P6 steel wheels at each corner – as it has today – the BS had a tendency to snap into oversteer if the driver lifted off the throttle while cornering.

Fitting wider rear alloy wheels (7½in compared with 5½in at the front) largely cured that, but those distinctive alloys disappeared sometime in the 1970s or later.

The chaps at Motor were not ones to do things by halves, and took the BS up to the Scottish Highlands. They had a few minor criticisms – excessively low-geared steering, spongey brakes, an unprogressive throttle action – but overall they loved it. ‘To have got a car so very nearly right without any serious development suggests not only competent design work but also that the finished product really could be a world beater,’ they said. The car’s ride quality came in for particular praise, as did the way its V8 would cleanly accelerate in top from under 20mph to its projected 140mph maximum. Fuel consumption, they reckoned, was roughly similar to an E-type’s, at 20mpg at 100mph.

The comparison with the E-type was prescient, because it’s widely assumed that opposition from William Lyons (who had a seat on the BL board) put the kibosh on the BS/P9  projects. It’s claimed that he thought Rover’s sports coupé might embarrass his ageing E-type and its replacement. It certainly didn’t help that, from 1968, Rover and Jaguar were both part of the sprawling British Leyland empire, and both competing for resources to develop badly needed new models.

One of the BS’s few public outings in this time of flux was the New York International Automobile Show, which opened on 30 March 1968 – the very day Motor published its road test. Strangely, the car was announced not as a Rover but as the Leyland Eight, evoking an all-but-forgotten 7.0-litre luxury car of the 1920s: it seems that, at a time of merger and acquisitions, management was keen to promote the new brand rather than its long-established constituents. How wrong could they be?

After that initial excitement, the BS was shelved as Rover concentrated on more pressing concerns. The Range Rover was due for launch soon, and the P6 and P5B would need replacing. Eventually the BS prototype passed into BL’s museum collection, making occasional appearances when BL needed to remind people that it had form when it came to making innovative cars – former Rover press officer Ian Elliott remembers the BS being wheeled out to help promote the MG EX-E concept in 1985.

Ten years on it emerged into the sunlight of a hot summer’s day for me to play with. Chances are it hadn’t been run for years, but the V8 fired up obediently, snuffling through its two big SU carbs – then, as always, running without air filters. The sound of air being sucked hungrily into those 2in SUs, as I would find out, tended to drown out the familiar soft, splashy burble of the V8 when on the move.

It felt good inside, with lots of room thanks to the lack of a transmission tunnel, although I noticed the considerable offset of the pedals to the left, just as Motor had back in 1968. I also noticed the Series 2 P6 dashboard, one of the clearest designs used on any car, ever – except that this car was built two years before the launch of the facelifted P6 in 1970.

The steering was as light as expected, but exploration of the car’s handling was limited by its surroundings and by the age of its tyres, which protested loudly as they surrendered their grip at ridiculously low speeds when making sudden changes of direction. But then, since the car had long since lost the wide rear alloys that were fitted to tame snap oversteer, that’s probably just as well.

The BS’s excellent ride quality seemed at least as good as that of the P6 saloon I owned at the time, though accompanied by equally P6-like body roll. And, while the V8 inevitably felt off-colour, it was easy to imagine just how impressive this car could have become. Clearly it was, as Motor had intuited, one of those cars that are intrinsically ‘right’ from the very start.

There’s a bit of a fashion these days to recreate iconic machines from scratch, whether it’s a Vickers Vimy biplane, a Gresley A1 steam loco or a Bugatti Atlantic. I’m not suggesting the Rover is in the same class as all of these – but wouldn’t it be fascinating to see a properly executed full-size replica of the P9, perhaps moulded in glassfibre and fitted with a hot V8? And finished in orange, of course.

Thanks to the Heritage Motor Centre for making the BS available. See it for yourself at Gaydon, Warwickshire: www.heritage-motor-centre.co.uk